Â鶹´«Ã½

Dale Peterson’s Eating Apes (University of California Press, £10.50/$15.95) is a passionate, enthralling book about the overwhelming hunger for wild meat that is destroying populations of gorillas and apes. He explores how attempts at conservation – for example, the Dja Wildlife Reserve in Cameroon – fail in the face of rapidly increasing numbers of people and expanding “human need and greed”. The Dja reserve was pierced by roads for loggers who had bought concessions to harvest the forests. In their wake came hunters who killed elephants and gorillas for the thriving meat market. Peterson says that one way to save the remnant ape populations would be to enter the auction against the loggers,…